


Epimetheus

by poisonandperfection



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works, Re-Animator (1985)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cardiophilia, Fetishization of Dissection, M/M, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 19:31:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1440130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonandperfection/pseuds/poisonandperfection
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herbert West runs a particularly messy experiment on a cadaver that reminds him vaguely of his assistant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epimetheus

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to go right ahead and fling this monstrosity out into the world. I did name the narrator briefly at the end there, based on the fact that Daniel Cain fills the same role in the film that the narrator does in the stories. 
> 
> Herbert quotes Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Epimetheus is Prometheus's impulsive idiot brother.

The dead man looked just a bit like his assistant. Herbert West allowed himself to observe this, but categorized it as a mild surprise, a small coincidence. Healthy young specimens were obviously preferred, in the best possible physical condition, and in a wartime hospital there were plenty to be had. All of them, then, bore some cursory resemblance to one another and to the living men outside. It was hardly cause for concern. 

This particular cadaver had a lean frame, broad-shouldered and fit, and the sort of strong features and dark hair that brought West's currently absent research partner to mind. It was missing the majority of its right arm, but showed no signs of further injury, illness, or infection. It had, presumably, bled out in the field.

The corpse had very little lividity and showed no signs of decay-- still, it was quite thoroughly deceased enough to make recovered consciousness impossible. In this specific case, that was preferred. West gave a little, curious hum and sank a scalpel gently into yielding flesh. His scalpels were very sharp, and his hands very steady, sliding through muscle at the top of the autopsy Y. The skin parted neatly for him with a minimum of mess, and he ran a finger gently along the long incision, smiling down at it benevolently. He fancied that it smiled back, a ghoulish, pink-lipped grin from neck to navel. He slipped his fingers inside and peeled back the flaps of flesh, pinning them efficiently and sparing the venous exposed tissue an oddly gentle touch, as if soothing an animal. 

He performed a rudimentary check for damage, sliding his fingers between slimy curls of intestine and tenderly palpating a glistening liver-- searching for discoloration, rupture, signs of disease-- and found none. "Yes," he told the corpse, brisk and calm. "I think you'll do. Though this will have to go." He prodded distastefully at the mess of pulped tissues and splintered bone that had once been an arm, and picked up a bone saw with a sigh. "I'll clean you up nicely. It's much easier to practice medicine on the dead, and, frankly, I'm beginning to prefer it." His assistant had been avoiding him lately, spending as much time as possible away from the research and from West himself, and somewhere along the way he'd begun to compensate, speaking to the dead in the same cool, conversational tone he had always used on the living. "Do you know, I think my speed at amputation and suturing has nearly doubled since I arrived here?" 

With the missing limb safely reduced to a respectable stump, he scrubbed the gore from his hands and repositioned himself by the cadaver's slack face, settling a tray of particularly unpleasant-looking tools within reach. "I assure you that this is for your own good." He smiled down at sightless, filmy brown eyes, and settled the point of the metal pick just to the left of its right one. "You see," he continued calmly, adjusting the angle with great care, "If your brainstem is intact, there is some chance of higher functionality-- nothing like life, I promise you, but some awareness, perhaps even a sense of pain. I wouldn't wish that on you." He swung the hammer and drove the spike neatly into the corpse's frontal lobe. It left only the smallest, bloodless hole when he slid it free, and he smiled down at his handiwork. "There."

He returned the lobotomy pick to the tray and moved at once to an icebox, drawing out a large, sealed bottle. "This may well have come from a friend of yours, but I'm certain he won't mind the favor. You're running a bit short on blood and there's only so much my reagent can do." There was a pump apparatus by the dissecting table expressly for the artificial circulation of chemicals and blood through West's specimens, and he filled a chamber of it with chilled and viscous liquid before returning the bottle to the icebox. "Don't worry, it's almost time." 

He paused a moment to examine the cadaver as it lay, ribcage protruding from the open torso, organs whole and plump and gleaming in shades of pink and brown. He glanced up at the face, swallowed once, and reached again for the bone saw. The ribs were fragile and easily snapped, but West took his time, cutting with a light hand-- to avoid any damage to the underlying organs-- and breaking the ribs away at the far sides of the chest as cleanly as possible. He worked in silence for a time, until, with a little, triumphant, "Aha!" he lifted away the breastbone and front half of the ribcage. There was a sharp snap and a wet, sucking sound, and then the heart and lungs were bared. "That's better." He licked his lips, almost nervous. "Now I can see you." 

He seemed compelled to step away and recollect himself, turning again to the sink and washing the blood from his hands with exaggerated care. He seemed calmer on his return to his project, peering more closely at the lungs with a sudden, downward quirk of his lips. "You smoked too much," he chastised the cadaver. His assistant never smoked-- his lungs were sensitive, and he hated the smell, besides. West seemed a touch shaken, and slightly annoyed. “Well, it clearly didn’t kill you.” He made a face and turned away, focusing his attention on an elaborate system of glassware that ended in a small retort with a few drops of clear liquid pooled in the bottom. He took his time with it, watching the liquid flow towards the spout—it was slightly more viscous than water, almost oily. He tilted the retort a few degrees further and poured the liquid into the chamber of chilled blood. The last drop clung to the lip of the glassware, and he upended it patiently over the reservoir, watching the drop stretch and bulge and finally fall into the pool of red, leaving perfect ripples. West returned the retort to its place, reached for the pump’s switch, and paused. For a moment, his fingers danced over the still heart of the cadaver, in the ghost of a caress. His lips moved as if in prayer, though the words were anything but pious. “The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom, shall drag thee, cruel king, to kiss the blood from these pale feet, which then might trample thee,” he murmured softly, and flipped the switch in a spasm of fierce joy.

The pump made a repetitive clunking sound, a steady mechanical parody of the human heart. The corpse looked more lively almost immediately, skin flushing, suffused with life and losing its waxy pallor. West drank in the details, the loosening of the muscles, the pinking lips, the heart still silent but engorged with blood, with a fanatically eager eye. "Ten seconds," he observed, breathless. A tiny droplet of red gathered at the site of the lobotomy, like a cadaveric tear. There was a rasping, rattling sound, and the cadaver-- no longer anything of the sort-- heaved its first reanimated breath. West's knees seemed to suddenly betray him, and he leaned heavily against the dissecting table, lunging awkwardly across his creation to flick off the pump. 

Its heart was beating. He watched, mesmerized, as the organ convulsed, clenching and expanding quickly, the lungs swelling and sinking slowly alongside it. "Thirt--" His voice cracked, and he wet his lips quickly, cleared his throat, and tried again. "Thirteen seconds. Reanimation." His eyes remained fixed on the moving parts for a long moment, before he dragged them upwards to the handsome face. The reanimate had a particularly regal profile, marked in part by a large, aquiline nose, whose nostrils flared ever so slightly with each inhalation. West's lips twitched into a faint smile, thinking of the sleeping profile of his assistant, as he lay in the cot across from his own at night. He touched its hair instinctively, then drew back. "You could be sleeping," he informed it, voice soft and awed. "And yet..." His hands fluttered hesitantly down to the opened chest cavity once again, and he rested his fingertips, with the utmost delicacy, on the sticky, muscular surface of the beating heart. It spasmed beneath his hand and he shuddered. "Beautiful," he breathed, and then, "My serum, my own invention, makes this possible...”

He choked on a laugh and fumbled for a cloth, daubing at the bubble of blood where the pick had entered its brain. "Don't cry," he cooed, his tone light and teasing. "We'll learn so much from you. I told you it would work." He reached for his scalpel again. "Now, will you trust me with your heart?" Another strangled, breathless laugh, and he reached into the chest cavity, splitting the pericardium and sliding his hand beneath the beating heart to assure himself of the locations of each branching artery that lead away. It beat steadily against his palm and he became gradually aware that his hands were shaking. His breathing was loud in his own ears as he tremulously positioned the scalpel point just above the aorta. 

Steeling himself, he sliced it cleanly in a smooth, upward stroke. A spurt of thick, wet blood pumped free of the opened passage, and splashed across West's chest. He froze in shock for a split second, gasping, and bent quickly to slash at the rest, fumbling gracelessly. Each beat of the wounded heart sent another wash of blood over his hands, slick and cool between his fingers, flooding the body cavity in a rising tide. He struggled for breath, the air heavy with the smell of iron. He could taste it sweet and thick in the back of his throat as he groped blindly for the vena cava. The heart convulsed like a sentient thing, an animal in danger, and West’s own heart struggled to match, pounding in his chest. The sympathetic rush made him dizzy and he shivered, his fingers seizing on the severed artery by mistake. The next pulse of blood splattered heavily across his face, covering his glasses, his cheek, his parted lips. He gave a little, startled cry and jolted backwards, gasping and coughing weakly at the taste on his tongue. He brought his hands up instinctively, shuddering as it ran in cool, sticky rivulets down his neck, wiping ineffectual streaks of gore along his cheeks and throat and biting back a frantic laugh. His hands were just as bloody, to the wrists, and it crept sluggishly along his arms as he slid his glasses off, fingers trembling, to wipe them clean on a dry patch of his shirt. “Now look what you’ve done,” he mumbled, hesitating a moment before dipping his hands back into the pool surrounding the fluttering heart. He cut it loose with broad, clumsy slices and carefully lifted it free.

It continued its wild pulses, as though struggling to leap from his shaking hands, and he hushed it mindlessly. "There now, shhh, shhh," he whispered. There was blood pooling on the floor, pouring sluggishly from the severed organ, dripping down his chin. "Oh, you're beautiful," he murmured, voice strange and hoarse and gentle. He looked reverently at the carnage, where the cadaver's lungs had slowed to a halt and deflated, where the liver emerged, an island of sleek brown flesh in a sanguinous sea. He examined its sightless eyes and slack face, and then the heart still leaping weakly in his grasp. "You always had a kind heart, Daniel," he told it reverently. His entire body seemed to have been destabilized, as though by a great exertion, and he wobbled slightly, breathing slow and deep.

There was a sudden sound behind him, sharp and loud, and he spun on his heel, nearly slipping in the bloody mess he'd made and clutching the slick and seizing heart close to his own chest.

"Herbert." His assistant was pale and wide-eyed, staring at the spectacle of gore with dawning horror.

"Daniel," West whispered back, voice breaking, and with a sudden, heaving lurch, the cadaveric heart shuddered through its final beat and slipped from his hands.


End file.
